Family Using Learning App
The use of technology has risen for all of us over the last few years during the pandemic, especially for families with children. Education tech, otherwise known as ‘edtech’ has never been more popular or necessary as parents and teachers have supplemented hybrid learning with educational apps to help kids stay on track or even get ahead. I recently spoke to Cristobal Viedma, founder and CEO of Lingokids, a leading educational app for early learning that experienced record growth during the pandemic and has now become a daily tool for millions of parents around the world. In this interview, Viedma and I dive into what makes an engaging tech product for kids, how learning has changed post pandemic and what’s next in the world of edtech.
Gary Drenik: Can you tell me what makes Lingokids different from all of the other early learning apps out there in the market?
Cristobal Viedma: I created Lingokids back in 2016 out of a personal need– I couldn’t find a safe, high quality and fun educational app for my niece, so I used my experience as a tech entrepreneur to create my own. Fast forward to today, Lingokids is an app that is trusted by 40 million families in 190 countries. We help children to expand their vocabulary, improve their literacy skills, learn the key components of STEM, and develop important social and emotional skills in a fun, safe, ad-free environment.
Our fun and modern personalized curriculum is one of our main differentiators, which is the outcome of years spent carefully crafting it among our Educational Board of early learning educators and kid edtech experts from companies like Hasbro, Disney, and Nickelodeon. As opposed to traditional physical learning systems, our curriculum is always up-to-date, features Lingokids empathetic and infectiously funny proprietary characters, and follows the latest trends in education, social and tech innovation. For example, you can expect topics like sustainability and composting, which you won’t find in other early learning apps.
And finally, a lot of families love Lingokids for our novel PlaylearningTM approach. Studies have found that a child’s motivation increases when they are having fun and that children develop better concentration when engaging in entertaining activities. Basically, kids learn through play. With this in mind, we build incredibly fun and playful content experiences that nurture the imagination and give kids a sense of adventure, all while helping them learn along the way.
Drenik: You have millions of families that are a part of the Lingokids community. When you are talking to parents, what are they especially looking for in the products they buy these days?
Viedma: I am a father myself now, and while I may be a bit biased, I think parenting has not been easier these past few years. With a very crowded marketplace for apps, it can be hard to determine what content is not only safe for your child, but what will actually help them learn and keep them engaged. Our mission at Lingokids is to help parents raise amazing kids through technology, breaking down learning barriers, and creating equal learning opportunities for children around the world.
When we talk to our Lingokids parent community, safety is a huge concern for them. They want to make sure that their kids are experiencing age-appropriate content and don’t accidentally see something they shouldn’t. That’s why we have built Lingokids as a completely safe experience for kids. The whole app is ad-free, assuring complete peace of mind for parents. But we know kids are viewing other content outside of Lingokids, so we also try to educate our parent community with the latest in online safety for when their kids are using content outside of Lingokids.
Parents are also more purposeful these days about spending time together as a family. According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics Survey, in the last 6 months, 24% of parents said they are spending more time with their family than ever before, which I think is awesome. When we hear data like that, we turn it into action. We encourage a lot of the content within Lingokids to be done together as a family– like our fun chants, songs, and games that we have made easy for everyone to participate in. We’re also producing several podcasts that we will release later this year that families can listen to together and are working with partners like Miko to offer some of our audio content in the Miko 3 robot for families to engage with around the house.
Prosper – Spending More Time With Family
Drenik: How has the pandemic affected your business?
Viedma: As we all know, technology has become even more essential since the pandemic. At the end of the 2021 school year, we surveyed parents and found that almost 70% of parents relied on early learning apps to help their children keep up in their studies. And we saw that impact directly on our business: Lingokids has tripled its number of users since the beginning of the pandemic. With that many parents relying on learning apps like ours, we feel a strong obligation to constantly innovate and create new and engaging ways to help kids learn through technology.
During the pandemic, we surveyed parents in the US and found that 86% of parents believe their child has missed out on learning social-emotional skills due to virtual learning. We decided to double down on our investment in developing activities related to skills like emotional intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking. We try to think about how we can help create better humans. How can we not only help kids learn math and science, but also encourage them to treat each other better and be kinder? This is a huge area of focus for us now as we create content.
Drenik: I noticed that a lot of your content has gone viral on YouTube. What are the key factors in creating engaging, educational content for kids?
Viedma: According to a recent Prosper Insights & Analytics Survey, 94% of households with children are watching YouTube. While we have premium educational video content on Lingokids, we knew that to reach this massive audience that is watching YouTube, we had to also have a presence there. During the pandemic we built out our content team and really focused on increasing our video efforts and I’m proud to say we now have over one million subscribers on our YouTube channel.
Prosper – How Often Use You Tube
In terms of creating engaging educational video content for kids, we have found that it’s important to release new takes on classics that kids love, as well as totally new, original songs. Our team created their own version of the ABCs, the Lingokids ABC Chant, which is now our biggest hit, with almost 200 million views to date. The Lingokids creative team is also constantly working to write and develop original songs and chants like our ‘Weather song’ and ‘Like this’. In all of our music videos we use engaging characters that kids love. Again, it all goes back to our PlaylearningTM method– the more kids can play and have fun while they learn, the more likely the lessons, or in this case songs, will ‘stick’ with them.
It’s also important to take risks with your content, even if it might fail. We recently introduced “Curiosity Videos” where we go deep into a particular topic like health, weather, earth science and more. For example our “What is Manure — Introducing Kids to Composting” video teaches kids about composting and how manure can help plants grow, all tied back to the concept of sustainability. We weren’t sure how well these videos would resonate with our community, but so far, they’ve been a hit!
Drenik: With the increase of kids using technology, what do you see as the future for kids edtech?
Viedma: We believe that personalization is the next big trend in the kids’ industry, especially in the edtech space. Every child learns at a different pace and has their own learning style, so for example, at Lingokids we have built a proprietary recommendation system that recommends the best interactive learning games and activities for a child depending on their interests, age, completion rates, and which skills they need to reinforce. We have also personalized our app so children can choose their own activities, giving them the opportunity to make choices and think for themselves, which is empowering for early learners.
We also believe that personalized learning will soon move into spaces that deal with emotional intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking. As I mentioned before, these skills are needed more today than ever before, but they have been traditionally hard to teach through an app. We are changing that.
Drenik: Thanks, Cris, for that insiders look at what you and the team are building at Lingokids. The future looks incredibly bright for the future of edtech.
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